The Poetry and the Politics

Radical Reform in Victorian England

Gregory James, James Gregory

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781780767239
• eBook ISBN: 9780857736192
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The nineteenth century was a time of 'movements' - political, social, moral reform causes - which drew on the energies of men and women across Britain. This book studies radical reform at the margins of early Victorian society, focusing on decades of particular social, political and technological ferment: when foreign and British promoters of extravagant technologically assisted utopias could attract many hundreds of supporters of limited means, persuaded to escape grim conditions by emigration to South America; when pioneers of vegetarianism joined the ranks of the temperance movement; and when working-class Chartists, reviving a struggle for political reform, seemed to threaten the State for a brief moment in April 1848. Through the forgotten figure of James Elmslie Duncan, 'shabby genteel' poet and self-proclaimed 'Apostle of the Messiahdom', The Poetry and the Politics considers themes including poetry's place in radical culture, the response of pantomime to the Chartist challenge to law and order, and associations between madness and revolution.Duncan became a promoter of the technological fantasies of John Adolphus Etzler, a poet of science who prophesied a future free from drudgery, through machinery powered by natural forces.
Etzler dreamed of crystal palaces: Duncan's public freedom was to end dramatically in 1851 just as a real crystal palace opened to an astonished world. In addition to Duncan, James Gregory also introduces a cast of other poets, earnest reformers and agitators, such as William Thom the weaver poet of Inverury, whose metropolitan feting would end in tragedy; John Goodwyn Barmby, bearded Pontiffarch of the Communist Church; a lunatic 'Invisible Poet' of Cremorne pleasure gardens; the hatter from Reading who challenged the 'feudal' restrictions of the Game Laws by tract, trespass and stuffed jay birds; and foreign exotics such as the German-born Conrad Stollmeyer, escaping the sinking of an experimental Naval Automaton in Margate to build a fortune as theAsphalt King of Trinidad.Combining these figures with the biography of a man whose literary career was eccentric and whose public antics were capitalised upon by critics of Chartist agitation, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in radical reform and popular political movements in Victorian Britain.

1

‘LONDONER OF BIRTH, SCOTTISH BY PARENTAGE’

James Elmslie Duncan described himself, in a broadside of 1849, as a ‘Londoner of Birth, Scottish by Parentage, Divinarian in principle’. The third element to his self-identity, I will explore in a later chapter. In this chapter I study the metropolitan and Scottish elements of his background. Very little, unfortunately, is known about his upbringing, but it was clearly an educated and lower-middle-class one – his father was described in the press as a ‘most respectable and worthy man’. James Elmslie Duncan was born 7 March 1822 and christened at Allhallows, London Wall on 2 June 1822. He was the second son of James Duncan and his wife Ann. He generally spelt his middle name ‘Elmslie’ but in his third attempt at producing a periodical, in the late 1840s, he styled himself throughout as ‘Elmzlie’ (under the influence of the phonetic reform movement). The Aberdeen Journal in 1850 described him as an Aberdonian, and David Goodway refers to him as the ‘Mad Scotchman’ in his history of London Chartism (as applied by observers of the young man’s behaviour, and perhaps an echo of the bearded convert to Judaism, Lord George Gordon of Gordon riots infamy), but there is no evidence from the numerous court appearances that he had a Scottish accent beyond the ‘Scotch’ adopted in some of his verse.¹ Perhaps he had a cockney accent, but again, we have no indication.

His father was born in Aberdeenshire in December 1790, the son of George Duncan and his wife Elizabeth, née Elmslie – one of the youngest of many siblings. James Duncan became a merchant and an accountant living and working at 353 High Street, Wapping, during the period of his eldest surviving son’s public career.

We do not know why he was drawn to London to make his living. John Fisher Murray, in his book The World of London, observed in 1843 that, despite the city’s immensity, comparatively few Scotsmen established themselves in London, because, he argued, of ‘the practical shrewdness and intuitive plain sense with which natives of that country are so bountifully endowed … enables them to see that unless they have a connection established the capitalists of London are too heavy metal to contend with.’² Murray argued that to the Scotsman, the Londoner was ‘mainly indebted … for our daily bread’ – and among James Elmslie Duncan’s later, all-embracing list of reform causes in the late 1840s was ‘the Abandonment of Death Work amongst Journeymen Bakers’.³ Duncan senior was certainly involved at one point in the provision of grain, although he also retailed other commodities, such as cheese. He is earlier listed in a Post Office Directory as a Scotch provision agent, at 5 Lower East Smithfield (a narrow riverside street, beginning at Butcher’s Row, with wharfs such as the Aberdeen Steam wharf, and Hawley and Downe’s wharf, and situated on the west side of Hermitage Dock) – perhaps with a relation, Charles Duncan, in the same trade, at Miller’s Wharf, Lower East Smithfield.⁴

James Elmslie Duncan seems to have been raised in relatively comfortable circumstances, for his father could afford to subscribe to the worthy weekly Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal – the ‘first family magazine of the world,’ as Duncan called it – from its inception (in 1832)⁵, had servants (or at least one servant, for one, Ann Gardener, sued for breach of promise when she became pregnant in 1846 by a Scottish ballast agent based in Wapping, and Duncan, described in the press as a Scotch provision merchant, agreed to corroborate her claim in court, but was then called away on business – or so it was reported⁶) and in the early 1850s was said to have an excellent stock in his general store or chandler’s store. This was evidence proffered by a Poor Law relieving officer when the Poor Law Union was trying to make him pay more for his son’s upkeep in an institution, so this may have been an exaggeration as James Duncan claimed his stock never exceeded £30.

We can infer nothing about James Duncan’s politics from his livelihood, although commentators did detect a definite bias in the case of the French épicier, or general provision merchant – he was the passive substratum, who ‘do not meddle with political opinions, or beat time in any way to the march of the movement’. Fiery youth, eager for change, confronted the épicier, ‘with his confirmed habit of order’. The Westminster Review, from which these comments come, discussed the ‘Physiology of the Epicier’, in 1836.⁷ A fascinating essay on the Parisian types, which appeared in the Scottish journal Hogg’s Weekly Instructor, in 1845, also suggested the grocer, or épicier, was the ‘upholder of conservatism’, but though like one ‘half-educated’ – who but the épicier read successive editions of Voltaire and Rousseau? Yet who but the épicier read the novelist Charles Paul de Kock, wept at melodrama, or mixed sentiment with maintenance of social order and stability?⁸ Of the British grocer, the discussion in the series of character sketches illustrated by Kenny Meadows entitled ‘Heads of the People’, suggested a similar apoliticism in a time of thriving trade, although, interestingly, in relation to James Elmslie Duncan, there was the recognition that the sons of grocers could, at least until they settled down, be given to sentimentality and theatricality, ‘his eldest hope has a jaunty active look ... you perceive that his hair is parted in the middle and suffered to curl a little over his shirt collar. You once detected him putting a clove into a letter which he quickly sealed apologizing for the delay he informs you that he likes his letters to smell sweet even though it is only a bill.’⁹ Were James Elmslie Duncan’s poetic sensibilities ever similarly expressed, at his father’s shop counter? He certainly had the hairstyle.

James Duncan married Ann Middleton, born in March 1798, and also from Aberdeen. Their ten children included George Middleton, born in 1818 at Broadford Street in Aberdeen, the only child of their marriage who seems to have been born in Scotland, who died in 1819; Jane Gordon, born in London in March 1820, who died in 1822; John, born in August 1824 (and received at Allhallows after having been privately baptised previously); Jessie Ann, born in September 1826, who died in 1828; George, born in July 1828; Gordon, born in September 1830; Charles, born in September 1833; William, born in July 1836; and Alexander Boyd, born in August 1838.¹⁰ The Duncans evidently made the decision to leave the expanding town of Aberdeen and move down south shortly after the death of George. All the later children were christened amid the classical elegance of the church of Allhallows, London Wall.

In the baptismal registers the abode was given as 26 St Mary Axe, which was the address for ‘Duncan, brokers’, in a London street directory in 1823.¹¹ The brokerage is unspecified in the directory but a partnership as provision factor with ‘C. Duncan’ was dissolved in October 1822; and James Duncan was a cheesemonger when declared bankrupt in November 1836, appearing at Basinghall Street Bankruptcy Court in December 1836.¹² By 1838, the year in which the Chartist movement emerged, the family had moved from this City address, a place of marine insurance and shipbrokers – now a financial centre notable for the skyscraper at No.30 known as the ‘Gherkin’ – to 5 Lower East Smithfield, James Duncan’s occupation being listed as merchant or provision merchant.¹³ At the same address was J. Shoobert, cooper and ships’ chandler, in the vicinity were opticians, a chart seller, a sailmaker and ships’ smiths. Presumably Duncan had settled with his creditors. There is no discussion of bankruptcy in James Elmslie Duncan’s work – but it may well have cast a dark cloud over his childhood, the ‘most spectacular form of economic failure in Victorian society,’ as Barbara Weiss describes it, ‘sudden, catastrophic, and final.’¹⁴ Although stigmatised, it was not an uncommon experience at the time, and Duncan’s change of trade was perhaps not unusual.

Five of the Duncan children survived into adulthood, including one of the sons who had saved enough money to emigrate to Australia some time in the early 1850s¹⁵, and three of the siblings who lived with their mother in Scotland, being maintained by the father (whether this was merely a temporary arrangement, we do not know). He was able to support, in that period, the Scottish Society (according to testimony given in a police court; presumably this was the Scottish Hospital for the relief of Scottish poor in London, or Caledonian Asylum¹⁶). An essay on the Scots in London noted that they herded together, having their annual Caledonian balls, their Presbyterian clergy, and the ‘annual dinner of the Caledonian Asylum’.¹⁷

We know nothing about the father’s relationship with his son before adulthood: one of James Elmslie Duncan’s earliest poetic effusions, about sea bathing, recalls his father rescuing someone from the sea who had been seized with cramp, but otherwise, James Elmslie Duncan revealed nothing in his poetry. Even verse about the death of an infant sister is unrevealing, or rather its superficiality is enlightening. As one reviewer suggested of the Chartist poet Gerald Massey, perhaps he wrote because he ‘has read poetry, not because he has felt it’.¹⁸

In James Elmslie Duncan’s incomplete novel Edward Noble the Utopian, the hero reflects, ‘strong, very strong is the influence of early training, early associations, of the recollections of a mother’s words, of a father’s advice’.¹⁹ His mother does not figure in his surviving prose or poetry, except, possibly, in the reference to snow in a paragraph in Morning Star, ‘It is in Scotland no uncommon thing for people to be lost in the snow. We were ourselves once consigned to this grave by no means to the comfort of our dear mother.’²⁰ He was, according to his own father’s testimony, ‘well educated, understood several languages’ – the police court magistrate Edward Yardley described his father’s ‘full duty’ towards his wayward son, in 1853, having given him a ‘very superior education’, by which was meant, perhaps, an education that went beyond the mere reading, writing and arithmetic which might be deemed useful for the sort of trade Duncan senior was engaged in.²¹

How formal or intermittent this education was, and indeed where it took place (perhaps in private or endowed Lower East Smithfield establishments), we do not know, but it was presumably supplemented by self-study. ‘I have been no little book-worm,’ he told his readers in 1845.²² His published prose was, if not replete with foreign languages, occasionally adorned with italicised words such as mens populi and émeute, but he did not have the habit, useful for the biographer, of larding his prose with quotations from other authors, so one has no evidence of the width or depth of his reading except the absence of quotation. Shakespeare, Milton, Goldsmith, Sterne, Burns, Shelley, and Victor Hugo feature in his published work.

James Elmslie Duncan saw himself as a member of the middle class, his education giving him access to the progressive and middle-class journalism of the age – The Times (which was praised by him, in late 1849, at least for its opposition to the New Poor Law and to protectionism), Punch, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (‘too much of Malthus, too little of Bentham – too much of Paley, and too little of Paine’²³) and Eliza Cook’s Journal (which, not surprisingly, since its editor was a popular poet, thought highly of the role of poetry: ‘no “dream,” but a reality of unmeasured influence and power, for good or for ill; so much so that one law-giver (Charondas) wrote his laws in verse, and another banished Homer from his ideal Republic’).²⁴

We are on more certain, if insalubrious, ground in relation to James Elmslie Duncan’s environment in his adulthood in the 1840s. Wapping was the site of the ambitious Thames Tunnel connecting the Thames Dock to the Surrey side of London at Rotherhithe (and finally completed in 1843, for foot passengers originally). Duncan’s home environment was full of maritime bustle; Wapping was the archetypal nautical district, lending its name to other districts in England, in Tasmania, and elsewhere.²⁵ Destroyed by later Victorian commercial growth, the Blitz, and post-war development, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Praise
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. ‘Londoner of Birth, Scottish by Parentage’
• Chapter 2. Flowers and Fruits
• Chapter 3. Herald of Progression
• Chapter 4. Peans for the People
• Chapter 5. Apostle of the Messiahdom
• Chapter 6. On Revolutions and Insanity
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography